The sweet smell of competition is lingering in the air. That sweet smell which indicates that somewhere in the vicinity a company is working on actually improving a product so we can all benefit. This time around, it's Adobe, delivering the first Flash 10.2 beta. Prime feature? Complete hardware acceleration of the entire video pipeline - fully cross platform, cross-form factor. Cross-platform! There's a catch, though.

The 950 GMA has no video decoding capabilities whatsoever, so there's nothing Adobe, or anyone, can do here. Well, the OpenGL-based colorspace conversion, compositing and blitting will help, but the video itself will need to be decoded in software. What can help here is a multithreaded decoder, because the Atom has hypertheading, but even ffmpeg-mt can just barely decode 720p.

In Linux, only Intel HD graphics (Core i3/i5 integrated) has hardware h264 decode via VAAPI. Hardware h264 decode on Intel 4500HD has been promised for Q3 of this year, but it's December and nothing has happened yet.